Missed it by that much —

If Verizon had its way, Siri would have been Android’s marquee feature

Would have been the default on Android devices.

In early 2010, Apple bought a company that made a popular iOS app called Siri. Its "intelligent assistant" features were incorporated into iOS 5 and made an exclusive feature of the iPhone 4S when it launched in 2011. While Siri has become synonymous with Apple thanks to its inclusion in the latest iOS devices, though, it almost became a marquee feature of every Android smartphone sold by Verizon.

According to a new Huffington Post report detailing Siri's rise from a DARPA-funded research project into the voice-based helper we know and love (or hate) today, Verizon had inked a deal in late 2009 to make Siri a default app on all new Android devices set to launch in 2010. Verizon was already making commercials showing off Siri's abilities on Android, according to HuffPo, when Steve Jobs came calling in February 2010.

Siri had just launched its namesake app on the App Store three weeks earlier. Jobs called Siri CEO and cofounder Dag Kittlaus, asking for a meeting the next day.

"The way that Steve described it, speech recognition—and how to use it to create a speech interface for something like the iPhone—was an area of interest to him and Scott Forstall for some time," Kittlaus told HuffPo. "The story that I'm told is that he thought we'd cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational interface."

Kittlaus, along with CTO Tom Gruber and VP of engineering Adam Cheyer, met with Jobs at his Palo Alto home to discuss Siri's technology. They demonstrated Siri's various abilities and discussed how the software worked as a "do engine" instead of a "search engine." Jobs was impressed, particularly with Siri's "snark," and Apple shortly bought both the app and the company.

Needless to say, the deal with Verizon was cancelled and the app was removed from the App Store before the iPhone 4S was released.

Though Apple has expanded Siri since then, it still doesn't quite live up to the promise of the original app, which could interact with far more services than than it does today. Part of the slow integration with new services is due to Apple's efforts to expand Siri from English-only to dozens of languages. And negotiating licenses to hook into Web-based services has apparently been more complicated than it was for Siri when it was a small Silicon Valley startup, according to HuffPo's sources.